Followers

I’d like to convince people, as well as myself, that I chose to orchestrate the first murder of this blog on April 1st so I could turn around and claim it was all in jest and, after months of keeping up the pretence, I could point my finger and give you all a Nelson. I’m not that clever, the truth be told and I had no idea I’d so miss satisfying my Thalian muse (or should that be Melpomenean?) on a regular basis that the urge to resurrect Japanmanship would, eventually, be too much to resist. So here we are.

Apart from forcing myself to write on a regular basis there are some other considerations which led me to this disappointing turnaround. The greasy, dirty satisfaction that only comes from overeating junk food or internet fame is actually quite additive, and if I am ever to have my magnum opus published it would help if I have a continued presence and a readership that could be a potential market. It’s no good telling a publisher I once had a fairly well-read blog for only a few months, I’d imagine.

What has been happening in the intervening months? Pretty much the same week the blog died its first ignoble death CRAM Magazine republished two of my articles (here). There has been little action from the magazine since, which is a shame as it looked quite a nice idea. I wrote and got published two articles on Gamasutra (here part 1 and here part the next), collating previously posted information on how and why to work in the Japanese game industry into an almost coherent two-parter.

Kind sites like GameSetWatch and FuckedGaijin as well as various other blogs have kindly posted about and vaguely lamented the discontinuing of Japanmanship, as well as provide links to posts while it was still going. On top of that, of course, I have to thank, and frankly apologise, to the many of you who left supporting comments on the previous posts.

So what can you expect from this resurrection? One reason I had stopped in the first place was a sense of burnout, precipitated by my compulsion to post regularly, whether I had something to write about or, as was often the case, not. This time around I will take a much more relaxed approach, only posting when I have something to write about and damn the frequency. But to offset this I have given the site a new look, which I am sure a lot of you will complain about. Blame CSS! I just chose an existing template and changed the graphics as any piddling about in CSS code is guaranteed to fuck up the layout beyond repair and raise my blood pressure a few notches. That said, looking at it now, I already hate the new design and may change it again at some time in the future.

I’ll try, but can’t promise completely, to lay off the negativity a bit. I know bitching about Japan is fun, but it isn’t fair, necessarily. Cries of “why don’t you just go home if you don’t like it there” would have been entirely justified reading back some older posts. That isn’t to say there won’t be some piss taken out of going on, but I’d ask you to remember it will mostly be tongue in cheek.

So let’s get this whole sorry affair behind us, ignore the past few months and just pretend nothing has happened.